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2004-04-19 - 5.57pm��previous entry��next entry
11 weeks, 3 days - woohoo!!
Aaargh, sorry, sorry! Another gap where I didn't mean there to be one! I meant to update at 11 weeks but um I didn't. I'm still feeling sick and it's soooo weird how using the computer aggravates the nausea so much. Weird weird weird. But anyway, when I feel particularly grim I don't want to go anywhere NEAR the computer, so I haven't. Well, occasionally I check email and little things like that but by the time I've done those few essentials I feel gross, so I never get round to updating diaries. But I'll feel better soon, I'm sure. I hope! Soon.
Okay so where are we? I'm pretty much 11 and a half weeks pregnant now! Wow, it is suddenly going so fast! The days are still so that I have a marvellous half hour from waking, and then feel sick till I lie down to sleep at night, so I mostly eat as often as I can and try to do things during the day, but I am just fixing my sight on bedtime all day long, and it's bliss to finally get there. I can feel the nausea ease off even as I'm getting sleepy and drifting off to sleep, and I know from then on I will feel fine during the night. When I wake in the morning I don't feel sick till I've been up for a short while, and it's another new day - a day closer to the 2nd trimester and a day closer to feeling better. So I like bedtime!
Let's see, what can I tell you?
Ooh we went to church yesterday!!!! I woke up feeling sick for the first time, and my hands and knees (!!) felt very shaky while I was getting ready to go and standing up and things, so I almost changed my mind and stayed home, but we went in the end. I took sweeties in my pocket for if I felt too sick during the service, and Neil had a marmite sandwich in his pocket for me, for if my stomach required a little more than a quick sugar burst. But ohhhhhh I'm so sad, I am really starting to find marmite nauseating at the moment :( :( :( I have been a marmite addict my whoooole life, and now it's queasy-making :( I hope it's temporary!
Anyway, church. It went really well actually, I was quite surprised! I was so excited to be there after so long, and it was so FANTASTIC to sing sing SING to God and just praise him with a load of other people around me. Oooh that was so great! I didn't stand up much at all, because singing and standing was too dizzying for me so I stayed sitting. I got really lightheaded singing one particular song with all my might, but oh well. Judith asked me if she should get me a drink of water or something, but I said I'd be fine. I knew I would be, and I was.
In the sermon I (noiselessly!) sucked on a couple of hard fruit sweets when I found myself getting more nauseous, which helped keep it to just queasiness, so that's good! And that's it! No further problems!! Yay!
And how GREAT it was to tell as many people as I could that I am pregnant! Sooo much fun. I've been looking forward to that for ages. I told.... hmmm, 8 or 9 people I think. Some seemed to know already but then we have a prayer chain at church and I was on it a couple of months back when I was bleeding, so whoever is on the prayer chain would have known about my pregnancy. I don't know who is on the prayer chain though, but one or two people I told just nodded when I told them, rather than getting big eyes and squealing like some other people I told! It is so much fun :)
I noticed that people seem to have almost a reflex reaction when you say, "I'm pregnant!" It seems to be completely involuntary - they all look at my belly, just for a brief second, sometimes even as they are saying congratulations or whatnot. I find it funny!
After a while I felt kind of like it would be good to lie down and eat something, so we left, and as we were leaving this guy who we know well stopped us. He said he was on the prayer chain and asked us how things were going now. I said everything was looking fine. He told us when he prays for us he feels strongly that our baby will be a special child, because of how there has been a battle for its life already. He feels that we have been chosen for this child, not the other way around. Wow. Neither of us knew what to say, we both felt so humbled and... I don't know, kind of emotional. We were both lost for words. I eventually said, "It's special to me already!" but wow, how lovely is that?! That is the first compliment we as parents have been given about our child, and there we stood, just like all the other parents do in that situation, pink with pleasure and bashfully speechless! It was a lovely moment, and I feel honoured and privileged that we have been CHOSEN for this child I'm carrying. What a wonderful thought.
Well, this special bean is growing nicely (and rapidly, I might add!). Bean is now around 4.5cm from crown to rump (head to bum!) and is currently growing around 2mm a day!!! Wow! This week the kidneys are producing urine for the first time, and the external genitalia are forming (though not in a recognisable boy/girl way yet). The baby is now able to pee into the amniotic fluid, and my placenta is now carrying all the baby's waste products (being produced in much greater amounts now) to my own kidneys and other organs to be excreted. I hope my kidneys will do fine. I should think they will but they do not function to 100% - a large portion of one of them is now scar tissue after a nasty (and undiagnosed - tsk!!) infection complicating an abnormal renal condition in childhood. The condition is all cleared up now but I hope my kidneys will handle all the extra work without any trouble.
Bean's eyelids will be fused shut from the end of this week for several months. Bean now has a lot of use of the mouth - it opens and closes and the tongue can move, and Bean swallows the amniotic fluid and can make yawning motions. It's all so amazing.
I am not sure whether I should be calling Bean "she" anymore. I still feel like it's a girl, but when I said that to Granny on the phone the other day, she said, "Oh that's EXACTLY how I felt with your father!" Hmmm! She was absolutely convinced, felt it in her bones, that sort of thing, right up until Daddy was born. And I came across a post on FF where a couple of ladies were talking about the huge surprise they got at the birth of their babies because they were completely convinced the baby was a girl (or boy) and it wasn't what they thought after all. So maybe I should ease off on calling Bean "she"? I wouldn't want to have the wrong idea about my little boy if that is what I'm having! I think I will try to stay neutral, although it is hard because I do feel a strong leaning towards the baby being a girl. But I'll have to be patient and wait and see!
What else? My womb is definitely growing. Ohhh yes. It is a centimetre higher today than when I wrote my last entry 4 days ago. I am now getting very uncomfortable in my pelvis, whether I'm sitting, lying, walking, whatever. It's not exactly painful, but it can be very achy and uncomfortable. Today I had some achy discomfort radiating down my left thigh, weird. My back aches in the pelvic bones a lot, and everything just feels sort of under pressure, as if pressure is making it ache and twinge.
It FEELS like my womb has almost completely run out of space in my pelvis. The last 2 or 3 days I have really noticed the difference and I find myself sort of rocking my hips and wishing my womb would just pop up out of the pelvic brim because it feels like that is what I need to feel some relief! I feel like I need to pee a lot in the daytime, but I only pee once in the night still. If I have gone to bed late and peed right before bed then I sometimes don't need to pee till I get up in the morning. But I REALLY have to go then! So I can't tell. With the peeing and the fact that I can feel my fundus almost 4 inches above my pubic bone, I keep thinking that my womb is already out of my pelvis, but then this "squashed" feeling in there and the daytime peeing, and the general instinctive efforts/desire for my womb to pop out makes me think that perhaps it hasn't yet. I hope it does soon. It's getting kind of squashed in there! Bean must be feeling it too, surely.
I still listen to the heartbeat every morning. It is slowing down nicely now, just exactly on schedule. The last few days it has been under 170, and today it is the lowest yet - 166, which is really good and healthy I think. I find the heartbeat 1cm higher now too - above my hairline which is nice! This morning I think I heard a "bump" from Bean on the doppler, for the first time. I have a lot of bowel sounds when I listen in (nice!) but none of them sound like what I heard this morning. I know Bean was active at the time because the heartbeat was moving around even though I was keeping the wand still. I got the heartbeat right under the doppler wand, nice and clear. Then I heard this sudden "boomph" sound, like when someone taps a microphone that's on, you know? Right before there's a screech of feedback?!! Well obviously there was no feedback on the doppler, but I heard that bump sound and I have never heard anything like that before, so I wonder if it was Bean? If so, that is SO cool, and I am so excited about it!!! :)
I went out for walks every day these last few days. I went twice to the cemetery, then we went to the park for a walk on Saturday, and then church on Sunday (very active!), and then today is Monday and I feel really tired and achy in my hips today, plus the weather is really rainy and changeable so I am staying in today and resting. But otherwise I plan to walk more. It's good for me. I find it uncomfy in my hips and back at the moment but it honestly does feel like something in there that's too big for the space and it's pressing outwards on my bones and everything. So I hope it will feel better when my womb pops out :) C'mon baby, grow grow grow!
I have been craving red meat since last time I wrote. Cottage cheese is totally OFF the menu! Boy am I changeable!! I had a bad attack of IBS on Friday evening, but Saturday we ate steak as that's what I was craving. Just steak. It had to be some big hunk of red meat, not mince or burgers or anything else. So we had these HUGE steaks, and I could have eaten another one when I'd finished mine! Then the next day we bought a joint of beef and had roast dinner. Now I am not so desperate for red meat, but I absolutely HAVE to have gravy. I need potatoes smothered in gravy. But where can you get decent gravy (homemade kind, NOT the gross stuff you get from granules or instant gravies you buy in the supermarket, blech!) without cooking a load of meat?! I just want gravy and potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that's just impossible :( But today I ate chicken pie with lots of gravy in it, and about 8 new pototoes! Yum. Gotta have gravy. Mmmm.... Not sure what I'll do for dinner though.
Well I'm sure there's other news but I can't think of it, and I'm hot and need a pee, so I'm going to stop now. I am hoping that any day now I might start to feel a bit better. I can't believe that in a matter of days I will be 12 weeks pregnant - that magic number I've been longing for allll my pregnancy so far!!! And it's nearly here! I know things can still go wrong, but I also know that from 12 weeks my chance of carrying my baby to term healthily is a whopping 98%!!! So I can't wait. I know the fact that I'm 11 and a half weeks now and can hear the baby's heartbeat healthy and strong gives me pretty much the same odds, but that 12 week mark is a goal I've been aiming for all this time, so I'm sticking to it!
Also my scan where we get to see Bean really looking like a baby and moving about takes place in just 11 DAYS!!!! It's not this Friday but the one after, so now that it's Monday, that makes it NEXT WEEK!!! Yay, so things are moving along nicely :) And I'm almost out of the first trimester.
You know what? To God be the glory for all of this amazing progress that my body and my baby have made. It's God who has made all this possible, and it's to God that I give all the thanks and praise for blessing me with a child. Thank you Lord, I love you.
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